What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a round of Phantom Division today with all four Phantoms equipped with Shotguns of various quality. I assumed it would end in disaster, with the amount of Threat being generated keeping the Phantoms buried in enemy spawns.

Instead, we won in 6 rounds, with only one Phantom being downed at all. Some of this was luck, but a lot of it was the sheer ferocity of shotguns in PD as opposed to those in STF. Even the basic shotgun is more powerful, and the higher-end guns (found whenever you get to draw from the LOOT deck) are truly devastating. In one attack, a Phantom managed to kill 3 enemies and take out a security camera.

HEAT: PEDAL TO THE METAL. This is fantastic. It’s from the design team behind FLAMME ROUGE, and has a similar lightweight feel to it. (Although like FR, there’s a lot more going on once you get down into it.) It’s published by Days of Wonder, and is the first DoW game I’ve seen in a while that really felt like a return to their glory days — where you open the box and are giddy and blown away by how cool everything looks.

The theme is 1960s auto racing, Parnelli Jones style, where men were men and cars were cars and both were made out of iron.

Everyone has their own deck of fifteen cards, with numbers. You play cards equal to your gear (1st = 1 card, 2nd = 2, etc.), total them up, and move exactly that many spaces. There’s speed limits for corners, slipstreaming. Standard stuff so far.

What takes the game to the next level is the Heat mechanic. At the start of the game you get six Heat cards on your player mat, representing pushing your car to its limits. You can put a Heat card into your discard pile to skip a gear when up- or downshifting, or to get extra movement at the end of your turn, or to tear through a corner over its speed limit. But when you reshuffle, those Heat cards will come back. And you can never discard them, so they will clog up your hand. The only way to get rid of them is to end a turn in 1st or 2nd gear — do that and you take a Heat card from your hand and return it to your mat.

So there’s this whole dynamic of trying to figure out when to push your car, when to let it recover, all framed by where you’re at on the track, how far to the next corner, and what your opponents are doing. Very fun and really compelling. Drive like a wuss and get left in the dust.

There is also a ridiculous amount of content in the box:

* four tracks (2 double-sided boards).

* a bot module for NPC cars. I don’t play solo usually, except to learn a game, but I did a solo race this morning against five bots and it was really fun. (I came in 2nd). Regardless, racing games need a bunch of competitors to provide more options for slipstreaming and blocking, so this is a great addition when you only have a couple of human players.

* a weather module. Adds little tweaks to various sections of the track.

* a car customization module, a deck of ~100 cards that you draft from. Tires that let you go around a corner faster, or brakes, or extra cooling to recycle Heat cards faster, and so on. Mix and match to build the car that suits your style as well as the track and weather.

* a championship module, where you do a series of races. Each series has a card that modifies the track, or gives a bonus to the winner. The card also says which corners the press pit is in — tear through that corner sufficiently fast and you’ll get sponsorships. There’s a score pad for tracking points over the races. If you combine this module with the customization one, your upgrades are persistent across the series. The insert has a separate slot for each deck, so you can stow your deck at the end of the evening and pick up where you left off.

All these modules are optional but easy enough and very fun. And the fact that they’re in the base game is just great — they could have all been separate expansions (and many companies would have done it that way — but DoW chose to make them part of the core.

Gameplay is very fast. All the thinky parts are done simultaneously. Each space has a number next to it, showing the number of spaces to the next corner, so you don’t have to spend time counting and recounting little squares. A race takes maybe an hour.

Plays 1-6 out of the box, but the insert has space for two more players’ cars and decks, so expansions look likely. Plus more tracks and stuff.

This is a real treat and a return to form for DoW. An absolute Rallyman and Formula D killer. I don’t know that it kills Flamme Rouge for me — I love the modular tracks and the core loop of your deck getting worse over time — but this is just a terrific game and I think it will dominate my gaming time for the foreseeable future.

I agree with all of that on Heat. The return to form for Days of Wonder is the angle I was planning on taking in my review.

I'm a huge Flamme Rouge fan and I cannot decide which is better.

Played Batman: Everybody Lies - a deduction game based on the much vaunted detective investigation system. We played the tutorial and I was underwhelmed with the experience. I could have been tired, but can’t imagine wanting to move on with the cases.

Followed up with Mirroring of Mary Kelley - we both thoroughly enjoyed this. Nice card play with combos and some call backs to MtG with the interrupts and the stack. I won on Wednesday as the ghost with some cycling of power cards through my memory and a couple of control cards.

Otherwise, we’ve been playing Wildlands - has to be Wallace’s best game in quite some time.

In gaming news, was gaming at a friends house outside Boston today . We've been meeting about every other week at his place since late September , playing WAR OF THE RING.  We play two games per session, switching sides. Chuck wanted to learn the game better  and he's gotten pretty good - playing a game repeatedly on a semi regular basis will do that. I'd say we're pretty close in terms of W/L maybe I have a slight edge. Since then I've logged 12 plays of the base game and today we used LORDS OF MIDDLE EARTH another two times. We're gonna keep using LORDS for awhile I think . 




We both used the Chief of the Ringwraiths to focus in Hunting the Fellowship early. In my game as the FP I was hit with a barrage of Hunt tiles  early and Strider died on a random Companion draw; but I was able to dunk the Ring with the Shadow at 8 VP. In Chucks game I got the Balrog out and after drawing a Reveal tile Chuck elected taking an alternate route via the High Pass/Mirkwood rather than drawing two more Hunt tiles for going thru Moria. I snuffed out Lorien ( and that bitch Galadriel ) in one round with the help of the Balrog  and used that army to head south and clean out eastern Rohan. Meanwhile he had Helms Deep maxed out so I screened it with the remnants of the victors of Lorien and cleaned out Minas Tirith and made sure to leave garrisons around it so he could not use the card that teleports a Rohan army next to it. I then moved Gothmog and a bunch of Easterlings to take Dol Amroth, which despite the presence of Gandalf fell . That left me at 8 VP. Meanwhile the Fellowship had made good progress, reaching the final step of the Mordor Track while I had an army besieging Helms Deep . Realizing I had to take it in the current turn or lose, I moved all the Nazgul up there and took Helms Deep on the last action die with only 4 troops left in my army. Stupid Hobbits....




As a bonus he's got a much more varied range of restaurants near him than the culinary wasteland of my town in rural NH   - we usually hit this Nepal place within walking distance after we finish the first game for lunch . 

Our last board game night

After the Empire - A worker placement castle defense game where you take actions to get resources, workers, soldiers to build and upgrade your castle and survive raids. You can upgrade your castle from wood to stone which gives you better defense. Goal is to defend your castle each round. Survive and gain resources. Get sacked and rebuild. I liked it at 2 and 4 player.

Cuphead - A co-op real-time dice rolling game where you roll dice trying to match symbols before time runs out. Each player rolls symbols needed to defeat the villain by accumulating hits Each villain deck has a boss you must defeat before moving on to the next villain deck. Each player can level up and gain special powers. I have not played the video game but my son has and he said the board game is VERY much like playing the video game. Loved the art!

Marvel Comic Hunters A set collection game where you collect sets of Marvel comics. A friend brought it to game night. The card art (Marvel comic book covers). makes me want to buy as well but as I'll play it with this group, no sense me getting a copy too.

Played 2 2p games of Heat tonight, one with just the base rules and one with drafting the car upgrades. Both games with 4 ai card (though the first time we didn't get the rules right for them). This game is GREAT first blush. Too tired ATM to type up much more but if you like racing games you should check this one out asap. Can't wait to bring it to game night next week and wrangle up a full table, but even at 2 the ai cars make it work quite well.

It was pretty cold yesterday, so the woman that I started dating recently came over for a cozy evening at my house. She didn't mind playing a couple of light filler games at GameZenter last weekend, so I showed her my board game collection and brought out Camp Grizzly. I played Becky and Chet while she played Saffron and CJ. She actually recognized Chet from Weird Science, and Chet had a very Chet-like game this time around.

We got really lucky with our early cabin cards, so that everybody except CJ had a weapon by turn three. That turned out to be ideal, because CJ's doppleganger entered play but was never a problem because CJ never got a weapon. Chet got a meat cleaver and cherry bombs, and racked up an impressive quantity of wins against Otis throughout the game. We also found both bandages and the first aid kit early on, and soon pulled together the items for the Barn escape. But as often happens in Camp Grizzly, getting everybody to the exit was a big challenge, especially after a fire broke out near the entrance to the Barn. We were all fairly battered near the end, and Becky died while trying to get through the fire. Then we exited for the Barn Finale, which was the Barn Dance!!!

The Barn Dance was vividly represented on the card by dance step diagrams (complete with dotted lines) executed in bloody red on a black background. It was a nice little abstract mini-game involving rolling and selectively re-rolling dice. CJ died after a couple of rolls, and Chet died just as he made the winning die roll. Saffron the conscientious objector proved to be the Final Girl, and she brought our only camper with her. My date enjoyed the game, which was ultimately the real victory this game.

Back in 2013, when Duel of Ages II came out, Barnes mentioned that he liked playing it solo. Well, I hadn't played a game of it since 2017, and I keep hauling it with me around the world, so I thought it was high time for me to try that out. It works surprisingly well, though you obviously lose the ambiguity of what card people are holding. But since it's basically a light war-game in structure, you can totally play both sides.

I had mentioned this somewhere here years ago, but it's a much deeper game than I gave it credit for back when I reviewed it almost ten (!) years ago. There are all sorts of things to consider when you build a team, lots of nuance to how you build the board, and then tons of tactical crunch on top of that. The thing I especially enjoyed was figuring out how to use the different characters who weren't obviously useful. It turns out that they almost all have a way forward, and it's not always very obvious.

So does it justify me keeping the game for all these years? Maybe. It's not nearly as fun as playing it with other people, because you really can't make those epic-scope games by yourself. There are just too many things to juggle to manage that much. But for someone who can't find regular opponents, and loves that sort of TTRPG/wargame hybrid? (i.e., me) it's not a bad stopgap.

Our podcast on Glenn Drover's new civ game Mosaic is up today. Games From The Cellar podcast.

The game is good, but has flaws. Our team conclusion is that they can be overcome.

Sagrilarus wrote: Our podcast on Glenn Drover's new civ game Mosaic is up today. Games From The Cellar podcast.

The game is good, but has flaws. Our team conclusion is that they can be overcome.

"This game is dancing on the edge of greatness"

Sagrilarus said that... About a civ game. Let that sink in.

Thunder Alley tonight.

Anyone else play this?

I played a decent amount of TA when it came out. It's got some really neat stuff with the way cars chain movement off each other and how you score your whole team and some other stuff, but it ended up being a little on the slow and fiddly side for me to really love. I think it's definitely worth checking out though.

We just played it to record another episode, and I'm really kind of on the fence with this one. I think, true to GMT style, this game is as much about a simulation as it is about a game. It is designed to play like a NASCAR race.

What remains is deciding how much I enjoy that. With the scoring as tight as it is on each car across the line, the winning player could be the person who wins 5th 6th and 7th instead of any of the top three spots. And the scoring kind of always means the game is going to be close regardless of how well anybody plays. As with Mosaic, I think it could use a few tweaks to make it a better game at least for me.

I used to really adore Thunder Alley. It has subsequently been passed by better racing games.